BDSM Safewords survey

Thanks to everyone who took part in the BDSM Safewords survey. This page gives basic details of who took part, gender, age, location, etc – and basics concerning respondents sexuality and BDSM preferences. It will contain links to all the articles on various aspects of the survey, as I write them.

This is a much more detailed survey than the polldaddy poll I did on this blog in August last year – but you may wish to see the results of that, which are here.

Gathering data

Data was gathered between 19 January 2013 and 3 February 2013.
There were 557 respondents recruited through the websites Informed Consent, fetbook, fetlife and through this blog.
There was no attempt to recruit a sample scientifically – this is simple what more than 500 people active on BDSM websites said about their relationships, dynamics and attitudes to safewords.

Oddities.

There were peculiarities with some of the data, so I have deleted a few records from the dataset. For examle, I have eliminated those records where the respondent only answered the demographic questions.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have also eliminated multiple responses from the same TCP/IP address and one or two stranger responses, such as the person whose sexuality was “Cod”, the people who had had 557,774,456, 100,000 and 9,800 play partners in the last 12 months and, amongst a few others, the retired 18-20 year old and the 18-20 year old who had left full-time education at 16 and had a doctorate.

This removed 24 records, leaving me with 533 to analyse. That means each record represents 0.19% of the sample.

The demographic information below is, at the moment, based on the entire sample of 557. Future analyses will be based on the 533 full or valid records. I think this is ok, because the eliminated part of the sample represents only 4.3% of the whole and most of these were people who gave demographic info but did not complete the survey.

Country of Origin: 81% of the sample said they came from the UK, 14% from the US and 5% from other countries (the largest groupings being the Netherlands and Canada.

Gender: 57% said they were female, 41% male and 2.2% expressed another preference. I won’t be analysing the other preferences separately, there were too few responses and, of those remaining in the sample, almost all chose a unique description of their gender choice.